Stout, brown butter, vanilla and digestive ice cream
Brown butter, Maestra beer and digestive biscuits: it tastes of toast, of caramel and of teatime. Dense and very rich.
The beer goes into the freezer while you prepare everything else. It is not fussiness: it goes in at 40 °C, and the colder it is, the faster the mix drops and the less aroma is lost along the way.
Ingredients
For 1 kgTick each ingredient as you get it ready.
Need to adjust the formula?
Step by step
9 steps · follow the order for the best result
Chef's notes
- ·Brown butter off the heat, at 85 °C. Beer ice cold and digestives on the way down, at 40 °C.
- ·Do not skip the cold ageing: it hydrates proteins and stabiliser and clearly improves the texture.
- ·The serving temperature depends on your recipe: if you formulate to a softer PAC than your freezer (say -11 °C with the chest at -18 °C), temper it for 5–10 min before serving; if the PAC matches your freezer, it can be eaten straight out.
- ·Why formulate at -11 and not at -18 °C: even though your freezer sits at -18 °C, formulating at -11 makes the ice cream tastes better — at -18 it is so cold that the taste buds barely pick up the flavour and the fat is slow to melt in the mouth. And keeps better: ice cream formulated at -11 and kept at -18 has less free water, suffers less from Ostwald ripening (ice crystals joining and growing) and keeps its creaminess longer.
- ·Keep your own notes: write down the POD and PAC that work best with your machine.
The texture
spot on
Soft and highly aromatic: the beer's alcohol keeps it from hardening and the brown butter gives the body back. The digestive biscuit and the pinch of salt bring a savoury base, so it lands closer to an after-dinner scoop than a teatime one.
All about this Maestra beer, brown butter and digestive ice cream
There is no milk: the base is water and milk powder, because the place of the liquids is taken by the beer. The fat comes from the brown butter of the advance prep and from the biscuits, and the ice cream sits mid-band.
The digestives are no garnish: they bring solids, fat and that buttery-biscuit flavour that ties in with the toasted note. The sugars are handled with sucrose, ground with the vanilla pod, up to the usual sweetness. It goes in alone on purpose: of all the sugars, sucrose gives the most sweetness per point of cold, and here cold is in short supply.
The serving temperature stays below the usual, and the culprit is the alcohol: the Maestra is 7.5° and freezes all on its own. This is a liqueur ice cream, a family Corvitto treats separately for exactly this reason; it comes out softer by design and it is worth knowing that before putting it in a home freezer.
The ingredients and what each does
Every ingredient has a technical job: cream brings fat and creaminess, milk powder raises the non-fat solids, the sugars set the sweetness and the freezing point, and the stabiliser controls crystal growth during storage.
Technique and controlling the numbers
Adjusting the POD (sweetening power) and the PAC (antifreezing power, given as a target temperature) lets you match sweetness and hardness to your taste and your machine. With the selectors in the side bar the formula recalculates itself and you will see how the amount of each ingredient changes.
Storage and common mistakes
Store at -18 °C in an airtight container and avoid freeze-thaw cycles. The commonest faults are not ageing it enough, too much sugar so it never freezes properly, and over-churning, which whips in too much air and wrecks the texture.
Recommended for this recipe
Equipment and ingredients that make the difference.
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